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Comment by wollef | Hacker News Reader

Isn't youtube without ads exactly the business model we should be encouraging?

People are really vocal about being perfectly ok with paying for ad-free products and not pirating, until the exact moment they actually have to fork out money.

YouTube Premium still requires you to create a Google account and accept their ToS & privacy policy and provide them with validated personal & billing information.

I am personally not comfortable with this and would rather have absolutely no business relationship with such a company. I’m using an Invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious) instance instead.

Would you be willing to pay extra for privacy? Seems like that could be a business model.

I wonder if the VPPA applies to Youtube?

I'm absolutely in favour of paying extra for privacy. However, it has to come from a company that I am willing to trust.

Google is an advertising company at its core and its bottom line relies on knowing as much about people as possible so that they can target better ads, thus I do not want to have any kind of business relationship with them. Their efforts to force users to opt into tracking (like dark patterns and the recent not-GDPR-compliant consent prompt) suggest me to steer well clear.

If they spin off YouTube as its own company, with its own account system (independent from Google) and ToS (that do not include anything regarding tracking - as it stands to sign up for YouTube Premium you do still need to agree to Google's ToS and privacy policy) I will definitely reconsider, but as it stands it is a hard no.

I was a youtube premium subscriber. They kept banning political youtubers, which is out of line with my values, so I quit being a subscriber.

I absolutely agree with the paying for no ads model, as I really, really like that model. The premium subscription was totally worth it, and the app with ads can be truly unbearable in comparison (but not so unbearable that I'm going to start paying them again).

I'd pay for YouTube Premium if it was just ad-free, and didn't bundle Red and Music. I'd easily pay 5$CAD/month for it, but at 15$CAD, it's a fairly steep price, and still doesn't remove all pop-ups and such.

Vanced provides the YouTube I want, I'd pay it that was available.

I would encourage creators to run their own in-video ads (avoiding unethical tracking) and collect funds directly from viewers (i.e. Patreon). This seems to be a much more stable way of collecting income, and doesn't expose them to the whims of YouTube's demonetization system.

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